Fertility in Prerevolutionary Rural China

This paper challenges the conclusion, reached in a recent reanalysis by Barclay et al. (Population Index, 1976) of John Lossing Buck's 1929-31 survey of farm families in seven provinces of China, that fertility in prerevolutionary rural China was at a moderate level compared with the fertility of other noncontracepting agrarian societies. It is argued here that the Buck survey sample was not representative of China, that the means by which the data were collected prompt doubts about their accuracy, and that the discarding of data for some localities biased the estimates. Higher fertility estimates derived from Taiwanese household registers of the period, retrospective fertility histories of elderly Chinese women collected by the author, and the findings of a 1930s study of vital events in central Kiangsu all suggest that fertility in premodern rural China, if not unusually high, was higher than the recent reassessment suggested.